Brazil for IT Outsourcing

Along with Russia, India, and China, Brazil is one of the BRICs, yet I don’t hear it mentioned often by service buyers, so I’m here in Säo Paulo to investigate the local market. I just spent two days at the Gartner Latin American outsourcing summit and I’m on a plane to Rio as I write this blog – heading to a one-day conference hosted by BRASSCOM, the hi-tech trade association here in Brazil. Nobody really needs an introduction to Brazil. You already know about the samba music, the beaches, and carnival, but this is also a nation of almost 200m people and the fifth largest country on the planet by area. Brazil was barely touched by the global economic slowdown due to a healthy domestic economy and in the past three months the GDP has soared by 9 per cent. In Europe or the USA, this kind of healthy economy feels unbelievable and unattainable as we limp out of recession. This is the fastest growth in Brazil for 14 years and things are just getting hotter, even in the southern hemisphere winter. So what are the advantages for the executive seeking an IT partner in the land of samba and soccer? The biggest advantage is the scale of the industry and depth of business knowledge. The IT industry here has a solid half-century heritage stretching all the way back to the mainframe era. Almost 2m people work in the local IT industry on a daily basis and the IT firms often recruit from outside their industry – so business analysts are not programmers who earned a promotion, they are bankers or doctors hired by an IT firm to offer their industry expertise to the technology teams. Brazil is a world leader in many business areas, for instance Internet banking has been normal for many years and Itau is one of the top ten global banks, political elections are 100% electronic, new oil and gas fields are being explored, and the environment is not a future industry – all new cars in Brazil can take alcohol instead of gasoline, or a mix of both. Brazilian IT firms are also very flexible. I’ve spent the past week talking to many of them and though most of them have quality accreditation such as CMM and ISO 9001, they often prefer to talk about Agile methodologies – it feels like a more natural fit for their attitude. The Brazilian mentality is very flexible, open, and sometimes challenging – a junior programmer would not be seen as out of place challenging a request from a client and that’s seen as a major benefit assisting one of the main issues with outsourcing – drone-like development teams churning out code that should never be produced, but is, because nobody challenged the client on the specification. Naturally there are some disadvantages. Brazil has been focused on a booming domestic market for many years so the IT firms have not really needed to turn their attention to the outside world. This does mean that many firms are not really ready to do business in English at all levels – even if all the people you get to meet can work in English rather than Portuguese. There is no real reason to go to Brazil for cost advantage alone. IT there is a lot less expensive than in the USA, but it can’t compete with India and other Asian countries. However, if you are not driven entirely by cost and you choose one of the suppliers with export experience then it would be hard to go wrong. The Brazilian IT market is a largely undiscovered gem, with millions of experts having decades of local experience now making their skills available to the world. And let’s face it, Rio in winter is still a place where you can do meetings in T-shirts, so what’s stopping you? *View Mark's IT Outsourcing columns

Brazil for IT Outsourcing

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